So I'm really a gay boy? And I still need to see "I'm Not There."
It seems that criticism on Todd Haynes has rather exploded since the last time I looked (while writing my thesis, in 2004). At the time, I was able to find less than a handful of academic articles to reference, and had to resort to quoting interviews and movie reviews. Now not only are there multiple articles on all his works, but even an entire
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But women, especially young ones, are not a REAL topic to most people unless they die or are sluts and so they´re just overlooked. I remember Todd Haynes talking about how Velvet Goldmine had become a hit with young girls and women mainly, and he said it wasn´t strange as they were the audience for Bowie, Bolan, etc as well, only they do not exist for marketing officials and so the film was marketed towards young men despite that.
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I should say that Davies never says "all these things make up a queer boychild." But in talking about queer childhood and queer subjectivity, these are things he brings up.
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...or maybe I just don't know enough straight boys.
So were you into suffering-orphan stories too, and striving after artifice/composing your life as though recreating a pastiche of your favorite fictions? That would be really cool if so.
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I later also had a strange fascination with abused-little-boy fiction, where the abuse tended to include queer overtones. That was when I liked Orson Scott Card.
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Yup, that was what my idea was too! Except that in my case I was part of the government, and I knew I was an alien and I had a guide from the alien Council to help me. :-) Except I don't think I actually had any of the issues you had then--I was just dreamy and imaginative, but I was happy enough in my social circles. I just wanted something more.
How old were you then? I know I took my idea of creating another imaginary lad from a story I read, but not the idea of it being an alien planet or the rest of it.
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I take it that Davies is talking about queer childhoods in Haynes’ films, and Haynes’ particular way of representing them, rather than experiences in general. (At least I hope.)
Yes, quite, although he does describe most of the experiences I alluded to as specifically (but perhaps not exclusively?) queer.
What is a queer childhood, anyway? Surely it can’t be queer in any meaningful sexual sense. One may have an alienated/lonely childhood, spent being apart from the crowd, which predisposes one to imaginative flights, etc., but that would only be queer in the ‘odd/unusual’ sense.
Ah, but we creative queers have rather embraced the idea of being odd/unusual, and are rather eager to attribute it to sexual difference rather than any boring minute character variation.
One conceivably might have a sudden urge to kiss another boy just as one might want to play in mummy’s ( ... )
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Perhaps if the idea was developed creatively in some depth, but personally I can’t imagine anything more banal than lonely = gay.
Oh, of course. Though it's not just lonely=gay, but lonely+artistic+unique=gay. You know. "We may be gay, BUT that makes us creative!"
Anyway, surely the odd/unusual = gay only works well if it does not fit into the already prevailing stereotype that odd/unusual = gay.
Hmm?
there is something annoyingly endearing in the idea of my having pink toys
Awwww. Yes.
nyway, the point is that a child’s categorisation of homosexual or queer is likely to be far more incomplete and flexible than an adult’s because these things are rarely discussed openly with children. Where these boundaries are ill-defined, queerness (or perceived-adult ‘queerness’, which is clearly not kid-queerness) abounds.
Indeed. This is why there have been statements made to the effect that all children are queer, since their sexuality does not conform to what is "expected" in proper heteronormative individuals anyway.
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